Hello, and welcome to Hive.
This article is a 10 minute guide to Hive and why its technology matters to the world. It is written for people who are completely new to the world of web3.
Hive is a big community of people that all use the same technology to do stuff online. Some people make games. Some people make social media sites. Some people make finance stuff. Most people don’t do any of that—they just play the games or use the websites.
You’re reading this post on one of Hive’s many social media sites (the Hive lingo for such a site is a “frontend”). Maybe it says “peakd” or “ecency” or “inleo” in your URL. All different sites, all using Hive.
The big thing is that no one owns Hive. All the value created by using it is shared among the builders and the users. There is no company or any corporate structure behind Hive.
Another huge difference is the ‘shared’ nature of everything. The games, social sites, and finance stuff are all connected together behind the scenes. If you’re not a technical person, that may not seem like something significant, but if you spend enough time exploring Hive, you’ll soon start to ‘get’ it.
A quick example: once you create a Hive account, you instantly have an account for every single thing that uses Hive, and everything that will ever be built on Hive in the future.
One more big thing: stuff on Hive is what we call “censorship-resistant.” Since no one owns it, no one can remove anything you post—not even you. So there’s a tradeoff: things you do on Hive are quite permanent, and always publicly accessible.
A lot of what you’ll find on Hive resembles the social media sites you know. We have a lot of blogging sites (they all show more or less the same content, they just have different ways of showing it). These mostly look and feel like Facebook, or Medium, or a news site.
All these things, if you remember, are known as frontends. They all share the exact same info, just present it in different ways. If you make a post on Peakd, it will appear in Ecency and five dozen other sites that you will never visit or know about :)
Hive games look and feel like browser games. There are people working on a more sophisticated game launcher for more complex games too.
And then there are a couple hundred other projects that can look like normal sites or completely wacky things that make your head hurt. It’s fun, but important for newcomers to stay focused on just a few frontends at the start.
See, the technology that Hive stuff uses is—and stay with us—blockchain technology. Yeah yeah yeah, you’ve likely heard that crypto and blockchain is shady or risky. Scams, cons, stupidly priced jpegs.
You know why you’ve never heard of Hive yet? Part of it is because we try to stay out of the blockchain and crypto hype circus, and we use the technology the way it’s supposed to be used—to connect communities and applications together in a transparent, public, and useful way. We try to call this “web3” instead of “crypto.”
No hype circus = low media attention. We’re hoping the good work we’re doing with the tech, communities, and reimagining the way the Internet works will be a positive news story one day. Let’s talk about that work.
Because many things look the same with Hive, the obvious benefits are also the same as things you already use. Games are (hopefully) fun. Social media and blogging sites connect you with like minded people.
The difference is in the ‘no ownership’ and ‘interconnected’ pieces.
When there is a central owner, usually that company or person is trying to make a business out of having their thing online (an exception to this is Wikipedia, though they still need donations to stay online). Since there’s a business involved, there’s usually a system built in to “capture value” or otherwise make money from the users using the thing.
Facebook doesn’t ask you to pay, but it bombards you with ads and sells your data. (Ads and data selling are just about the most popular way to capture value.)
Hive not only doesn’t do that at large, but it also redirects its value back to all the users. Essentially, Hive is a giant co-op: when you use Hive you start to build up a stake in the system, and the bigger your stake, the more value you can capture. Let’s explore the most common example on Hive:
Whenever you make a social media post on Hive (using any of the frontends), the Hive community assigns value to these posts, and you get some of it.
At the time of writing, this post for the Scholar & Scribe community paid the author about $0.55 worth of HIVE assets. Here’s another example of the cool ‘shared’ nature of Hive—with that $0.55 of assets, the author could:
You might read the above and be thinking: wait, I can get paid to blog?
Technically, yes. But don’t quit your day job. While every social post made on Hive has the potential to earn rewards, it is far from a guarantee. Like anything else in social media, it takes time, discipline, consistency, and a good dash of talent to build up anything substantial.
Take your time to get to know Hive, its communities, and the way the various things work. This will set you up to get the most out of your efforts here.
That said, let’s take a moment to talk about these rewards and the money—admittedly this is the part that usually gets people the most curious.
Every 3 seconds, a small amount of $HIVE coins are created and added to a big Reward Pool. This printing gets less and less every year, and will stabilize around 2037.
When you make a post on Hive, or even a comment, people can upvote it or downvote it. Just like on other social sites like Reddit, Facebook, X, etc. Every upvote (or downvote) uses some fancy math to decide how much of the Reward Pool should “go” to the post. The biggest factor in the math is how many $HIVE coins the voter has staked (also known as Hive Power). More on staking a bit later.
After 7 days, the collective upvotes and downvotes and math is finalized, and a payout occurs. Let’s say you make a post and it is assigned to receive 3 $HIVE (about $1 in value at the time of writing). The 3 $HIVE is removed from the Reward Pool and:
Half of your reward (0.75 $HIVE) will be automatically staked as Hive Power to your account. The other half comes “liquid” in the form of either $HIVE or Hive Backed Dollars ($HBD).
We know that this probably raises more questions than answers. The Hive rewards system is one of the most interesting and complex aspects of this place, so we won’t take up more time in this guide getting into the weeds. There are many people and communities on Hive that can help you learn more. We especially encourage you to join the Terminal Discord and ask all your Hive questions. They’ll be patient with you!
If you think this is something you want to be a part of—awesome. The first step is getting a Hive account.
Before you jump in, there are some really important things to know:
Above all else: these accounts are NOT like a regular social media account. For one, there is no simple “password recovery” system. We don’t even really use passwords here (more on that in a moment). But if you struggle with remembering or keeping passwords straight… two pieces of advice:
Don’t get involved until you get better at password stuff. Seriously.
If you must get involved, do not invest any serious money into your account.
Remember how no one owns Hive? No company or corporation? This boils down to each user being 100% responsible for their account security. You and you alone. If you forget your Facebook login—no problem, just do a reset. Facebook owns your data and they can go change it and get you a new password easy-peasy.
Hive does NOT own your data and there is nowhere to “go” to reset anything. Let that sink in.
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Okay, sunk in yet? Now it’s only fair to tell you we were being slightly dramatic. There actually is an account recovery system but it is tricky and hard to wrap your head around. You don’t want to have to go through it, and it has a good chance of failing if you don’t do everything perfectly.
Since there are hundreds of projects on Hive, there are just as many ways to create an account. Some ask for money, some are free but require an email. You’ve a lot of choices, depending on how anonymous you want to be.
We’ll assume that for your first steps in Hive, you aren’t opposed to using an email address or similar. We recommending signing up with:
Your account name is also called your wallet address. “Wallet” is web3 lingo for account, basically. You’ll get used to it :)
Instead of a password for your wallet, you are given four special keys. The keys are long strings of gibberish—very hard to remember and even type properly.
Whoever knows these keys effectively controls the wallet.
When you make a wallet, only you will have access to the keys. But if someone else gets a hold of them—they also “own” the wallet.
This is different from a password. Very different. Might not seem different at first… but trust us. These keys are way more sensitive than a password. People who are huge crypto nerds (or have huge amounts of crypto) do things like etching these keys onto metal for safe storage. You probably don’t need to go that far today, but in general:
We realize this kind of sounds ridiculous. But when you really let it sink in that you and you alone are responsible for the security of your keys… well… going a little overkill to protect them can be worth it.
Download the Hive Keychain browser extension—it will quickly become your best friend. You can (safely) type some or all of your private keys into it so that you don’t have to deal with typing them a hundred times a day.
Okay, now that you know how to make a wallet, using your new Hive powers is fairly straightforward. Most sites and games behave like you’d expect them to. But there are a few “web3” terms and actions that are good to know about. You’ll encounter all of these soon enough.
In the blockchain world, a “transaction” is a catchall term for “doing something that changes the blockchain.” Many Hive things require transactions, and you use your private keys to confirm that you are signing (confirming) the transaction.
Hive Keychain will pop up and ask you each time you’re required to sign. It takes care of the keys, and you can also ask it to stop bugging you if you’re doing a lot of transactions with an app that you trust.
Hive isn’t the only web3 social thing out there, but it is one of the few that are FREE to use.
The way we keep it free: we give everyone some free transaction credits (aka resource credits) every day. When you’re new, you don’t have a lot of RC so you might get some transaction errors.
To get more RC:
We’ve used this “staking” term a few times. Here’s what it means: you take some $HIVE coins and you lock them up so you can’t trade them. They’re locked up for a minimum of 13 weeks. When they’re locked up, they become “Hive Power” or HP, and grant you more say and sway over Hive.
To unstake, you just press a few buttons. The amount you want unstaked slowly trickles back into “liquid” $HIVE over the course of 13 weeks.
Staking gives you:
Final piece before we close. Hive is effectively maintained and run by a group of users called Witnesses. These folks or groups run special servers (called nodes) that make all of Hive… work. Anyone can be a Witness provided they have the technical skills to run those nodes.
There are hundreds of Witnesses but the Top 20 Witnesses matter the most.
Every wallet gets to vote for 30 Witnesses. The weight of your vote is your Hive Power. Many Hive users don’t even care about this, but they sure should, because all the good and bad and crazy and fun of Hive boils down to how these Witnesses operate.
Well, for you, hopefully a bright new Beginning here on Hive.
We know you have more questions, and as chunky as this thing was, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Hive and its possibilities. Come ask your questions in TheTerminal: a Hive Discord for newbies to get oriented. The folks there are super nice.
Or if you’re more into reading, there is a depository of various newbie guides here. There is tons of content in there, including some Spanish translations too.
Good luck!
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Images in this post were created using a Canva Pro License. PeakD, Ecency, and InLeo logos belong to their respective apps. The Hive logo belongs to all of us :) The human illustrations are by browniemother on Canva.
